Butrint intramuros

This first volume of the series Corpus of the Mosaics of Albania is also the first of a larger collection, Mosaics of the Balkans. The authors, Marie-Patricia Raynaud, archaeologist specialist in mosaics, and Agron Islami, chief restorer of mosaics, worked together in Albania for a long time, combining the study of pavements with their conservation.

The book is the result of the work of a whole team for five years, in the field, in archives and in libraries. It establishes a complete catalogue of all the mosaics discovered in the Butrint peninsula, the legendary City of the south of Albania, from the Hellenistic to the Byzantine periods. Each pavement is described with overall photos, maps and drawings, reconstructions and photographs of the details. The history and historiography of each monument concerned is considered.

The second part of the book gathers some reflections about the mosaics of Butrint : about their environment, the successive mosaics workshops, the analysis of glass tesserae, the iconographic studies of themes encountered, snakes, theatre masks and baptisteries, and the case of the transformation of an ancient nympheum into a church. After the presentation of the team and its work on the mosaics, the volume ends with a large abstract in Albanian.